DC’s CTO prepares for data onslaught on inauguration eve

Techies in government at CES mull how to protect critical infrastructure?and …

As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to take the oath of office in Washington, DC—and political junkies flood into the city for their chance to catch a glimpse of history in the making—the city's telecoms are bracing themselves for a torrent of traffic from hundreds of thousands of tourists Twittering, texting, and uploading snapshots to Flickr. But the city government is equally determined not to be caught flatfooted: On a panel devoted to critical infrastructure protection at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, DC's Deputy Chief Technology Officer provided a glimpse behind the scenes of the Geek Squad to the nation's capital—the office that could give us the nation's top techie.

The familiar face of the annual Consumer Electronics Show is pure Vegas: a spectacle of plasma screens and blinkenlights and booth babes, a sea of killer apps and Next Big Things—if you believe the press kits, anyway. But far from the madding crowd, in a quiet conference room above the buzzing show floor, is a more somber CES: CES Government, where Washington, DC's tech technocrats fly thousands of miles to address their fellow DCites. Among the more interesting offerings at this year's convocation was a panel on critical infrastructure protection, featuring DC's Deputy CTO, Chris Willey.

Though cell providers have been working for months to increase capacity in anticipation of this week's inaugural festivities, Willey explained that the city is "assuming we're not going to have access to the cellular networks." Instead, they'll be leaning heavily on the city's 800MHz land-mobile radio network, as well as wireless broadband, to coordinate operations.

Also figuring in the city's plan, however, is the WiMAX network built by Sprint and Clearwire. Though plans to offer commercial service on the network late last year have been delayed, Willey explained that the network equipment is in place, waiting to be turned on. If necessary, the city can also exploit that fallow spectrum.

The inaugural preparations are an extension of the Office of the CTO's broader approach of preparing for the worst by ensuring redundancy—a philosophy Willey says is guided by the rule: "assume you're going to have an outage or a breach."

A smooth inauguration could bode well for Willey's boss, CTO Vivek Kundra, who is widely considered one of the two top contenders—along with Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior—for the national CTO position that Barack Obama has pledged to create. In a city where local government services are rarely held up as models, Kundra has won kudos for innovative initiatives like the Apps for Democracy "mash-up" contest, which doled out $20,000 in prize money to citizens who came up with novel ways to make public government data more user-friendly.

The openness to outside ideas represented by the Apps for Democracy contest is coupled with ruthless testing to determine which work and which don't. "We're all about metrics," said Willey, "but it's one thing to have them, another thing to understand what they're for." To make use of those metrics, the CTO's office employs a "stock market model," Wilely explained: "If you walk into our project management office, you'll see screens, probably 12 in a room, each with a different project on it." Data about each initiative is used to generate a "happiness index," which in turn yields a Wall Street–style "buy," "hold," or "sell" rating for the project.

The office's mantra, says Willey, is that "what's good for operations is good for security," because "security breaches don't just happen, they sort of develop over time." He credits that approach of integrating security into the broader operational strategy with the office's quick response to a previously unreported problem that arose several months ago: DC's own version of the Terry Childs fiasco in San Francisco, when a disgruntled network administrator locked down the city's FiberWAN network. Though unwilling to provide much detail about the incident, Willey said the CTO's office had been called in by another city agency facing a similar problem, and was able to restore access within 24 hours, preventing public embarrassment.

With the race for America's Next Top Geek entering its final stages, the inaugural test of DC's communications networks could help determine whether Kundra is bound for the White House.